New war on graffiti

Graffiti is a problem in almost every city nationwide, and many have geared up to fight the scourge systematically, as New York City did in addressing a range of public nuisances in the 1990s. Pawtucket...

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Posted Aug. 16, 2013 @ 12:01 am

Graffiti is a problem in almost every city nationwide, and many have geared up to fight the scourge systematically, as New York City did in addressing a range of public nuisances in the 1990s. Pawtucket is the latest Rhode Island city to upgrade its effort to get a handle on graffiti.

Graffiti is crime, and often goes hand in hand with gang activity. Graffiti vandalism is a form of “signature,” a marking of “territory.” A sophisticated effort to photograph and track graffiti tags, as Pawtucket has begun, should catch more vandals, deter others, and lead to a greater understanding by police and the community of this anti-social behavior.

Tracking crime’s “flow” by computer, as New York did, and as Pawtucket’s police and its Department of Public Works are now doing with graffiti, helps police predict where crimes might occur rather than limiting authorities to reacting to crimes that have already taken place.

Such “nuisance” crimes as graffiti may strike some as low in priority, but as New York Mayor Rudolph Giuliani found when he and Police Chief William Bratton focused more enforcement on such activities, serious crime fell too, more evidence of the efficacy of applying political scientist James Q. Wilson’s “broken windows” theory: Addressing such signs of neglect and lawlessness helps lessen major crime, too.

So violent crime in New York dropped by three-quarters in 1992-2005. This was in part because neighborhoods that felt besieged by crime and neglected by police started to feel respected again, fostering cooperation in fighting the full range of criminal activity.

Often, vandals are stopped on their way to worse activity. In New York, many arrested as public nuisances were carrying guns, whose discovery let the courts take them off the street for extended periods. This reduced crime, and caused other criminals to think twice before packing heat on a day-to-day basis. Thugs without guns were less likely to commit “crimes of opportunity” on the spur of the moment.

Nabbing taggers can also halt teenagers’ progress toward more serious criminal activity, and that may be the best way to prevent future crimes.

Providence has had some success with this strategy of community policing in the past decade and we expect that Pawtucket will too, especially if it expands beyond graffiti to other crimes, low and high, over time.